The Folger Spotlight

I met director Aaron Posner in a Las Vegas casino. I honked out bits of Bottom and pieces of Puck alone on a 3000 seat Vegas showroom stage to Aaron Posner and Aaron Posner alone. We had both been working on…

Faith, sirrah, an you’ll knock, I’ll ring it. / I’ll try how you can sol, fa, and sing it! -Grumio We’re in the midst of week two of rehearsal and things are going well. We’ve blocked nearly the entire play,…

I’m Danny Scheie, and I play Grumio in Folger Theatre’s upcoming production of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. As a tiny Shakespeare nerd in the wilds of the Prairie State, I repeatedly encountered mention of the faraway Folger Shakespeare…

Was ever match clapped up so suddenly? –Gremio And, just like that, the first week of rehearsals for Folger Theatre’s 2012 production of The Taming of the Shrew is in the books. And what a fast, furious, and productive week…

Here let us breathe and haply institute / A course of learning and ingenious studies. Hello and welcome, one and all, to the Folger Theatre Production Diary. I’m Thomas Keegan, and I play Lucentio in Folger Theatre’s upcoming production of…

The Taming of the Shrew is a great story. And while it is funny, surprising, playful, and political, too, a great deal of it swirls around issues of gender roles, identity, money, and power. Last year, while I was thinking…

Hello, readers of the Folger Theatre Production Diary! My name is Louis Butelli. I was a contributor here during Folger’s recent production of Othello, in which I played Roderigo. Last week, I was asked if I would put together a…

Last week I attended the Shakespeare Theatre Association conference in Florida, hosted by Orlando Shakespeare Theater. It was a great gathering of Shakespeareans from places as diverse as the Livermore Shakespeare Festival in California to the great Polish city of…

No! Say it ain’t so! On behalf of the whole cast, I think I can safely say that a marvelous time was had by all during this lovely production of The Gaming Table. It was certainly not without its hiccups!…

Farewell Friends, Parents, and my Country; thou Dear Play-house, and sweet Park, Farewell. —Buckle, The Gaming Table It’s hard to believe we have just closed The Gaming Table. It simultaneously seems like just yesterday we were sitting around a table…

On the road in North Carolina, I recently saw Cody Nickell (Petruchio in our upcoming production of The Taming of the Shrew) at PlayMakers Rep, where Joe Haj (who directed Folger Theatre’s award-winning Hamlet) is artistic director. Heart on sleeve and…

I had a friend who was studying to be an anesthesiologist. When I asked him what it was like he described it as “hours of boredom and seconds of terror.” I found his statement astonishingly applicable to working as an understudy in live…